A Year in Reading: Jess Walter

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Sometimes choosing one or two books from a whole year is like trying to pick the best meal you ate — great bites keep coming to you (wait, what about that fig and pancetta pizza?) In 2014, I ate well: Jenny Offill’sDept. of Speculation might have hit me the hardest; it’s airy, funny and haunting. Rebecca Lee’sBobcat was so good it made me want to be a writer. I tried to be the last person in America to read Patti Smith’sJust Kids and I think the 2010 National Book Awards got that one right. I loved the sweep of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’sAmericanah and the weightless beauty of Alejandro Zambra’sMy Documents (coming soon) and got into John O’Hara (thank you Penguin for reissuing), especially the big, weird, funny, I-can’t-really-tell-if-this-is-great-or-terrible omniscience of BUtterfield 8. Just this week I read a terrific debut: Mitchell Jackson’s pulsing and powerful The Residue Years (which also serves as a great counterpoint to hipper-than-thou Portland). And finally, the Spokane Shakespeare Reading Club is nearing the end of its two-year project — drunkenly discussing each play — and hey, get this: it turns out Hamlet is pretty good.

So far this year, I've read 56 books, an unpublished manuscript, and 100 pages of Moby-Dick. I loved many of them, although not Moby-Dick (Sorry Herman Melville/Amanda Bullock.). But the reading experience I feel most evangelical about was one of those brief passionate affairs, red hot and over too soon.
I bought Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close from the front table at Word Brooklyn on the Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend and read it the next day, in one sitting, on a flowered blanket in Madison Square Park. It’s honest, sharp, enjoyable and unnerving. It’s witty but it isn’t cute. It creeps into your stomach and makes you dizzy -- at least it does if you're a 32-year-old woman trying to figure out life and relationships and where the last 10 years went and where the next 50 are going.
While this book certainly covers floral bridesmaid dresses and date dissection over cocktails, it has a darker and more resonant undercurrent. It gives voice to my quiet suspicions that the decade following college graduation is one of loss after loss; a time of people you once loved immensely peeling away into parenthood or panic attacks or bad marriages or sudden religiosity or the suburbs. It captures those strange mixed feelings of trying to be happy for friends when they choose things you think you know will never make them happy; the helpless panic as the strongest and most ambitious feminists give up and give in or maybe just grow up and learn to compromise and who are you to judge anyway? It displays real wisdom about the ways that, over time, paths dead end and options disappear and life can feel like a narrowing of possibilities when you always thought it would be an ever-broadening horizon. Also, it's funny.
When I finished, I did two things.
1) I wrote a blog post calling it "a perfect book" and recommending it thusly: "If you have ever been in your 20s or 30s, ever lived in New York or Chicago or D.C., ever been in a relationship that was good or bad or probably both, ever been politically engaged or diamond-ring engaged or had a baby or not wanted a baby or been an assistant or found out your ex married someone you both went to college with, oh my God you guys."
2) I gave it to my best friend from college. She related to it so intensely she refused her mother-in-law's request to borrow it because it would be too much like allowing her to spy on her life.
In general, my favorite literary genre this year was what I like to call "women-processing-their-shit books," in which I also recommend Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schappell, The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld, The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein, Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle, and anything by Nora Ephron or Cheryl Strayed.
More from A Year in Reading 2012Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.

The other night, at a party, someone asked if I consider my writing to be political. I said no, but also yes, always, what else can it be, since I’m an immigrant, a woman, and a person of color, living in a time and place in which more or less every aspect of who I am has been politicized.

Joshua Henkin is the author of the novel Swimming Across the Hudson, which was named a Los Angeles Times notable book of the year. His new novel, Matrimony, was published in October.The book that comes most immediately to mind is Andrew Holleran'sGrief, a slim, restrained, beautifully rendered novel about a gay man whose mother has just died and who relocates to Washington, DC, after having cared for her for years. Holleran does so much so well, but perhaps most striking is how compellingly he writes about solitude; many a writer has tried to do that, only to succumb to inertia and solipsism. Another writer who writes wonderfully about solitude (and just about everything else) is William Trevor (if you want brilliant, heartbreaking solitude, take a look at Trevor's short story "After Rain"), and his new book of stories, Cheating at Canasta, is terrific. So is Donald Antrim's memoir The Afterlife, which, speaking of grief, is about his mother's death, but also about many other things, including the purchase of a mattress. I loved Helen Schulman'sA Day at the Beach, the best of the 9/11 novels I read this year. This novel, too, is about grief (are we sensing a theme here?) - political and cultural grief, of course, but also about family grief: the novel is a domestic drama about a marriage in trouble, with 9/11 as the backdrop.More from A Year in Reading 2007

Hugo Hamilton is the author of the New York Times notable memoir The Speckled People and its sequel The Harbor Boys. His most recent book is the novel Disguise. He has been awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, France's Prix Femina Etranger, and Italy's Giuseppe Berto Prize. He lives in Dublin.It's always fascinated me how history is used in order to accommodate the present. For years we heard the maoning in Ireland about Eamon De Valera - freedom fighter, treaty-opponent, head of state in the fledgling Irish state whose vision of the Irish future was derided for so many years after his death as a home-spun mess. At last, we have a biography of the man which gives a deeper understanding of his character and his time. Judging DEV by Diarmuid Ferriter examines history from a new perspective, with a touch of sociological instinct at the core of his thinking.The Shores of Connemara by Seamas Mac an Iomaire (translated by Padraic de Bhaldraithe) Imagine Darwin arriving on the shores of Connemara. This small account of a local fisherman off the coast of Connemara, places us back in time almost a hundred years to a vision of the sea and the land in an innocent state. It is seen not by a professional marine biologist or botanist, but a local expert who observes everything he sees with great curiosity. In his descriptions of sandhoppers, for instance, and why they hop on a fine evening, is always a mixture of scientific enquiry, folklore, religion and childish delight. His book, above all, reduces the pace of change and gathers up all the qualities of time, the absence of hurry, in the landscape of the west of Ireland.More from A Year in Reading 2008

In 2010 I read Mavis Gallant’s collections, Varieties of Exile and Paris Stories. Gallant is in her 80s, a Canadian who moved to Paris in 1950, an important writer about whom I knew nothing, I’d heard her name. My Gallant discovery –- in reading, the discoveries that count are ones you make for yourself -- started when browsing in St. Marks Bookstore, where I noticed a new book from the NYRB press; its title intrigued me, Varieties of Exile, so I read a sentence, became excited, bought it, and read each story. I felt (and feel) wild about her brilliant language and the complexity of her mind, the sophistication and breadth of Gallant’s experiences and complementary syntax. Her stories are as richly puzzling and daunting as Henry James’s, Edith Wharton’s and Chekhov’s. In the US we’re overwhelmed with novels of inexperience and memoirs of bad experiences. Gallant’s fiction comes from lived experience, knowing-ness, and out of intellectually fertile situations, where troubled, fascinating characters, not good, not bad, are as alive as words get. Her stories –- some set during and after World War II -- carry history into the continuous present. I’ve just started reading an out of print copy of Paris Notebooks, her day to day observations of May 1968. So, I feel lucky. In this past decade, I’ve discovered Mavis Gallant and Paula Fox, for myself, and even in this fiercely stupid, dull ugliness we live in now, they shine. Hell, they light me up.
More from a Year in Reading 2010Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions

The essays are almost meaty, thick with her usual intelligence and insight, quiet and calm on the surface but deep in both feeling and meaning. I couldn’t walk away from these and come back to find them unchanged.